Set theory

“Here, here! I know one! Here it goes: Are cardinals countable? Now... lets see: Richelieu, Wolsey, Borgia... [laughs] Wait, wait! I have more of them! What do you get if you put all cardinals into one set? A paradox!”

Unbeknownst to most people, advanced set theory has many real-world applications.

Set theory is an obscure strain of mathematics. It is the study of things which may potentially contain other things. It is further theorized, through the principle of induction, that these contained things, in turn, may contain yet other things. Also, the contained things which are contained inside the previously mentioned contained things may yet contain other contained things that contain even more contained containers that may or may not reference themselves among other things. However, these things may not contain themselves, as that would just be plain silly.

Contents

During the Golden Age of Naïvety, you could put whatever you jolly well pleased into a set. But unfortunately, this unrestrained licentiousness led to a massive boycott by the barbers of the world, who weren't quite able to figure out if they themselves were supposed to be included inside their own sets or not. And thus a massive government regulation process began.

In 1908, Senator Ernst Zermelo drafted the AXIOM Act: a set of government-enforced regulations which attempted to protect the world from the deadly barberous threat. The laws were as follows:

Law of Equivocation: Two sets which contain the same items must be advertised as equal products.

Law of Civil Unions: If two sets love each other very much, they are permitted to form a pair and have a civil union. However, unionized sets were forbidden to divorce each other, as that was a grievous sin in the eyes of the LORD.

Law of Replacement, or your Money Back: All stores must be guaranteed to stock every individual item from the ever-popular set Natural N. Stores must allow people to pick and choose whatever they want to keep in their personal sets, and also allow people to replace any item in a set for another item of equal or lesser value.

Law of Supersizing: Stores must also offer a Power Set version of every set which they sell. This is largely due to the efforts of hip trendsetter Georg Cantor in popularizing the Power Set.

Law of Regularity: All sets must contain the daily recommended dosage of fiber (later, sets bundled with fiber came to be known as fiber bundles). Regularity is the foundation of a healthy lifestyle.

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that women have a constitutional right to choose; and that as a result, a woman may freely take individual items out of her own personal set. This ruling was extremely controversial at the time, but fortunately, women aren't mathematicians.